Ancient Eostern Woods

Early in the present century, wood technologists pulled wooden door beams out of the mud that for ages had covered forgotten cities near the mouth of the Euphrates River in the ancient country of Chaldea.

When they identified the wood in those doors they were surprised to find that it belonged to forests growing only in the Andaman Islands in the remote East Indies. It was mute testimony to the high importance placed on wood as a building material in this ancient land; for the route which ships must have traveled to carry these timbers to their place of use, and this before the time of compasses, followed the whole coast of India, a distance of about 7,000 miles each

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An Editorial

NuSprs'.by Goldberg

Writing in The fgs Angeles Times of Sunday, March 29, abott theifpjected new $10 million auditorium to be constructed on the developing Civic Center Mall, Music Editor Albert Goldberg said:

" way, or a total of about 14,000 miles for a cargo of this planking. lVlore than a hundred high school forestry students of the Redwood Region come together each spring for an Annual Junior Loggers Conference.

.And one hopes the planners will remember that an auditorium is primarily a place where music and speech are to be heard. They cannot be heard satisfactorily unless size is restrained to minimum limits.

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"Nor is so-called acoustical engineering the answer to all the problems of hearing. It can help to avoid echoes, but our observation has been that acoustical engineers are generally more concerned with the transmission of a high level of sound quantity rather than with quality. Almost all new American halls are deficient in the properties which enhance the quality of musical tone.

"Every musician knows tl-rat wood alone is the most desirable reflector of musical sound; that is why, in spite of modern advances in synthetic materials, string instruments and piano sounding boards are still made of wood. In all the new German opera houses we visited last year, the walls of the auditoriums were constructed of wood and there were no acoustical problems. We inquired about the fire hazard and were told that present methods of fireproofing fulfill all requirements of safety.

"Maybe it is presumptuous to make these suggestions to experts. But a great deal is at stake; we may be forgiven for lvanting Los Angeles' new auditorium to be the most beautiful, the most attractive and the best sounding one in the whole world."

It was figured by the finders of the planks that ships of those days could not have carried more than ten or twelve thousand feet of lumber at a time, and each trip would have taken about two years. We know nothing about freight charges six-thousand years ago when this building was estimated to have been done, three-thousand years before the days of Nebuchadnezzar, but that must have been very expensive building material, even at the lowest possible rates.

INDUSTRIAI SPECIALISTS lN FOREIGN ond DOMESTIC HARDWOODS ond SOFTWOODS for every requirement

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